


your scars are healing wrong

by zauberer_sirin



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Comfort Sex, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Gen, Grant Ward is a villain let him stay that way, POV Alternating, Skye and May teaming up, This Is Not A Grant Ward Friendly Fic, Wishful Thinking, ambiguous mentions of dubious consent because Grant Ward, mentions of Coulson/Audrey, mentions of Ward/Skye but not in a shippy way, this is my sparse prose mode
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-20
Updated: 2014-04-20
Packaged: 2018-01-20 02:02:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,514
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1492651
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zauberer_sirin/pseuds/zauberer_sirin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>"Well," she laughs, "I'd like to say this is the first time I've been the proud recipient of a pity fuck, but I'd be lying."</i>
</p><p>Skye comes up with a surprising coping strategy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	your scars are healing wrong

**Author's Note:**

> Here's the story. I already tried to write a [very mature, very Gen fanfic](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1480489) regarding my feelings about the whole Ward debacle, and I liked how that turned out. But then I remembered fic is also wishfulfillment and said to myself: to hell with it, I want to write a fic where Ward gets his ass kicked, May and Skye bond over the whole thing, and it all leads to Coulson/Skye sexytimes. So I sat down at Starbucks and wrote this in a bit. So, self-indulgence alert and all that.
> 
> Title from Regina Spektor.

  


  


They are losing the war.

They are losing the war and it's all her fault.

 

&

Every time that a piece of information contained in that hard drive leads to HYDRA killing another agent, raiding another facility, exploiting another gifted individual, Coulson looks at her and he can see a piece of the girl Skye used to be being chopped away. He wonders how long before nothing remains. He's not sure he will be able to bear it, when that happens.

"He jumped out of the plane to save me," Simmons is saying, in one of their now-usual _how-could-he-do-that_ evening sessions in the lab. "Why would he do that?"

"To gain our trust," Coulson states, simply and sadly, feeling old and foolish and completely exhausted. "To make sure we would never doubt him."

"But," Fitz says. "The South Ossetia mission. I thought Ward liked me."

Simmons puts her hand on his back. "We all thought he liked us."

Everybody is very pointedly avoiding giving Skye a sideways glance; Coulson thinks Skye looks like she's glad May is on the stick and not part of this conversation.

Then Skye speaks.

"I have to tell you, I've read Agent Hill's assessment of Ward and she should definitely have given him better marks under people's skills." Coulson looks at her, surprised. "What? I don't get to make grim jokes? Of the people in this room I'm the one Ward conned into sleeping with him, not you guys, I think this falls within my rights."

Everybody in the room, even Trip, turns to her, horrified shock on their faces. 

" _Skye_?" Simmons, in a small, frightened voice.

"Oh, please, stop being so damn sensitive."

 

&

"Talk me through it," he says.

May and Skye both shift to the edges of their chairs, moving at a rhythm. They move together these days, Coulson realizes. They have been teaming up more and more, and he gets that, of course he does, anyone would. He knows they had a night-long conversation in the wake of Ward's departure from the team. Things changed after that.

These days there's some sort of – he wouldn't call it solidarity exactly, but a kind of understanding between the two of them. There's a reason why they have fought so hard to find Garrett's headquarters. There's a reason why they are the ones who have managed the feat.

It's their plan, their call. Coulson knows as much. He's just here to help them out.

"Why go with such a small team?" he asks. He doesn't imagine HYDRA will be short on goons.

They tell him Garrett is complacent, which he didn't need to be told about. They tell him his hubris means a reduced team. That HYDRA has its hands full these days elsewhere, _everywhere_. Spreading thin – not like SHIELD, of course, but thin enough. Enough, they hope. Skye and May don't use the word _hope_ , though, they use _prediction_ and _opportunity_ , they are in sync in their pitch to Coulson, like seasoned salesmen.

"The element of surprise outweights any other consideration," May says, that tone she uses to shut down any venue of argument. Coulson knows it well.

"The base is a closed compound," Skye explains. "According to the specs it takes them 47 seconds to shut everything down from the inside. More than a few men on the task and we'll be found out immediately. This is the only way. It could even work."

He studies her face; she looks resolute, hungry for some kind of justice, but she still looks sad and angry and bereft. The hollowness in her eyes. It makes Coulson's stomach turn in an ugly way.

 

&

The day before the assault Skye passes in a daze. 

Not because she's nervous but because she's not. She spends it helping out with the preparations ( _Should we be worried about your apparent familiarity with explosives?_ Simmons asked, like they all have forgotten she used to be a hacker with anarchist leanings; Trip just gave the mixture an admiring look). She sees Coulson checking their ammo with a worried look on his face. Skye much prefers May's approach: she wouldn't be disturbed out her meditation exercises for hours.

"What did it feel like?" she asks her, in a low voice because yeah, she doesn't actually have a death wish. "Before Bahrain? Did it feel like something bad was going to happen?"

May looks at her for a moment, and Skye wonders if she is even going to get a reply, if she _deserves_ a reply; then something in May's face softens, opens up.

"No," she shakes her head. "It didn't feel like that. It felt... normal. Just another mission. There was no intuition, no sense of doom. Nothing."

Skye thinks this information might be useful, because all day she's been walking around with the feeling she's going to die tomorrow.

The news of HYDRA's attack on a SHIELD-funded research facility reach them after lunch.

 

&

"How can I help you?" he asks, when he can't stand to see her like this anymore.

They are in his room. It's the night before the assault on Garrett's stronghold, their one last ace up the sleeve. Two more men have died today because of what was in the hard drive Skye gave to Ward. Two more men have died and Coulson's hand is stroking her hair, thumb brushing along her cheek. Two _civilians_ , no wonder Skye's like this.

"You want to help me?" she asks. 

Something in her voice frightens Coulson.

He nods.

She kisses him, more teeth than flesh, and more desperation than desire. Coulson surprises himself by kissing back almost immediately, and when Skye's tongue slips into his mouth and pushes against his own Coulson surprises himself again by pushing right back, one hand darting over the curve of her hip.

"Skye. What is this?" he asks when he manages to recover his sanity enough to pull away.

She has him grabbed by the shoulders. She looks terrifyingly calm.

"Listen to me," she tells him, voice both intimate and dangerous. "I might die tomorrow. In fact chances are I'm going to die tomorrow. No, no, wait, _listen_. If I die tomorrow I don't want a murderer on HYDRA's payroll to be the last man who ever touched me. Can you understand that?"

In a twisted way he can. He puts himself in her place and he can. He puts himself in her place and – 

"But, it doesn't have to be me, you could –"

Coulson considers the options. Fitz, Trip. Neither of them bad options, and both of them a lot better suited to Skye than him. But he also knows why she could never go to them.

Her hands move from his shoulders to his neck, Skye holding him in a decided but gentle grip.

"There's no one in the world I trust the way I trust you," she tells him.

She kisses him again. There's no teeth or rush this time and he's already made the decision.

 

&

She's not surprised that it all goes more or less how she always imagined sex with Coulson would feel like: weird and safe and unexpectedly hot.

It's his hands what strikes her the most, how good those fingers feel over her skin, inside her, holding her, tracing the outline of her bones.

 

&

She puts her hand up against his chest as he lowers himself onto her. Even through his t-shirt he knows she can make the shape of his scar. He doesn't like that, will never like that, doesn't want anyone to do that, but it's a bit less horrible because it's Skye.

 

&

She laughs against his shoulder. "Well, Coulson, I'd like to say this is the first time I've been the proud recipient of a pity fuck, but I'd be lying."

She watches his eyes cloud.

"Not a pity fuck," he says.

She shrugs, her bare shoulder brushing against the sleeve of his t-shirt. She feels curiously unconcerned, being naked under his gaze, like they do this every night.

"Okay, a solace fuck, then."

"Don't –" he starts, stops himself, lets it slip between them, whatever he was going to say.

Skye takes one of his hands in hers, lacing their fingers together. Again, she thinks she loves these hands.

"I know this is messed up," she tells him, "but I feel better already. Like, whatever happens tomorrow, I have _this_ now. And I know we're not... And this is not... could never be. But at least I'll know not everything that happened was fake. This wasn't."

She holds on to his hand, tightly gripped, pressed to her chest. Coulson looks at her in a way that's not entirely about pity. Skye is not expecting him to lean over and kiss her but he does.

 

&

"Oh, fuck, Coulson," she starts, sitting up in bed all of the sudden, just as he is drifting off to sleep.

"What?"

She looks appalled and alarmed. He has no idea what could have caused a reaction like this, out of the blue.

"I hadn't thought about... Oh god, Coulson. Your _girlfriend_."

He sits up. "My... _what?_ "

"The woman– The woman you're in love with. I didn't want to... Have I messed things up? I didn't even stop to think. How inconsiderate can I be?"

He puts his hand on her shoulder, fingertips following the lines of muscle and bone. She's trembling.

"Skye, Skye, calm down," he tells her. "She and I... we're not together."

"You're not?" she looks genuinely surprised.

"We talked about it," he admits. It's strange to be talking about this with Skye. Stranger than having sex with her, he thinks. "We talked about it at length. We decided it was never going to work. It was just a nice fantasy. Something I could never have. People like me, we don't get that kind of life."

He looks at Skye and realizes he might have made a mistake; she seems inconsolably sad. She grabs his hand in a feral grip, almost digging her fingertips into his palm.

"You deserve to have everything you want," she tells him, with childish vehemence.

Coulson wants to tell her to just go to sleep, wants to remind her tomorrow they have a long day ahead of them. A long, dangerous day. But somehow he can't, words stuck somewhere in his lungs. They stay like that for a while, his hand in hers, her eyes studying him a bit too closely.

 

&

She almost considers not taking a shower this morning.

After all, this was the point of last night.

Because if this _wasn't_ the point of last night then – 

Skye takes a shower.

 

 

&

He grabs her shoulders, at first to make sure her bulletproof vest is tied tight enough, then just because. He grabs her shoulders and tells her:

"You're not going to die today."

 

&

About sixty seconds after they set foot in HYDRA's base the world becomes a thing of fire and noise. 

She's going to die here today, she thinks, and something twists inside her when she realizes the idea doesn't frighten her that much. Maybe this is a good moment to make her exit. She doesn't want to die, of course. She is going to fight with everything she has to survive. But she cannot see how she's going to be glad to be alive, at the end of all this. It's too late, it's too late for that.

 

&

He's not going to lie: it is inmensely satisfying seeing May, knee digging into the bastard's back, slipping the handcuffs on Ward's wrists.

 

&

"Don't take it personally, sweetheart," Garrett is saying. She's on the ground and he's holding a gun and Skye always knew everything was going to end today. "If it's any consolation Ward pleaded with me to let you live. He disobeyed my orders more than once, for you. The crush he had was real."

It's no consolation. She can feel anger turning the inside of her mouth into sandpaper. There's one thing she's definitely glad about: that down here she doesn't have to see Ward again before she dies.

Skye closes her eyes.

A gunshot, but it's not Garrett's.

Skye opens her eyes. Garrett's bloodied hand, the gun out of his reach, an impressed smirk of pain on his face.

"Good shot, Phil. And here I thought you were rusty."

Coulson approaches, gun to Garrett's head. From where she is Skye can see something ugly staining Coulson's usually kind eyes. Garrett can see it too. His lips curve upwards once more.

"Finish it," he tells Coulson.

But the second gunshot never comes. Coulson shakes his head.

"No. Death is far too good for the likes of you."

 

&

And he is not going to lie, he _definitely_ enjoys shoving Garrett, hard, into the back of the SUV.

"You know you can't keep the girl safe, don't you, Coulson," he says. "The information is out in the world. They know what she is. We made sure of that."

He could tell him that it's not his place to keep Skye safe and it never was. She'll do that herself. All he has to do is help out. He could tell Garrett that but he doesn't see why he needs to waste his breath.

"Try not to bleed too much on the seats," he tells Garrett instead.

 

&

"I don't want to _see him_ ," Skye says, hopelessly. She knows Ward is near, behind her, being hauled into a car by Trip's strong hands.

May puts one arm around her shoulders and leads her away from this place.

"You don't have to," May says, gritted teeth and yet soft. Skye cries quietly into her neck, smelling something acrid like a mixture of gunpowder and sweat, and she's still not relieved to be alive, but so relieved about everything else.

 

&

"Not for me," May explains, when he catches her grabbing something from the first aid kit.

"Skye?"

"Just a scratch, don't start worrying."

"And you? Are you–?"

"I'm okay." She offers him the bandages and disinfectant. "You wanna do it?"

Coulson considers it. "You go. She'll be grateful it's you."

May does this thing with her eyes that is not rolling them but for intents and purposes feels like it.

"Phil?"

"Yes?"

"You're an open book."

He smiles at her. When was the last time they talked like this? He doesn't remember. "I guess I am." Then, trying to change the too-tender subject: "I'm also glad you're okay."

Her shoulders stiffen.

"I didn't know if you would. After all that's happened."

"Don't ever doubt that. Whatever else is going on – I'm glad you're not hurt."

May looks down for a moment, almost shy to meet his eyes. She should have known, though, that after Ward and what he did to them Coulson doesn't have much time for minor treasons done in the name of friendship. But he also wonders if he would have been so quick to forgive if Skye hadn't forgiven first.

"Go see to the team," he tells her.

"Yeah. I'll take care of... the team."

 

&

She survives the day.

That's kind of inconvenient, actually.

 

&

"I have an offer to make you," Skye tells him.

"What is it?"

She kisses him. They are in his office. He's sitting behind his desk and she has to bend over. His cheeks in her hands. This is completely different than when she kissed him that first time, he thinks. This time, too, he finds himself returning the kiss in the moment, without thinking.

"That's the offer?" he asks her.

"No, that's the incentive," she smiles. A kind of smile he hasn't seen in days, maybe longer. "Look, I really thought I was going to die today. I never thought I'd have to deal with the repercussions of what I did to you."

"Skye, you didn't do anything _to me_."

And if she only knew how true that is.

She shakes her head, but she doesn't seem to be contradicting him on that, which is good.

"Let me finish. Here's my offer: I really have no idea. I've always suspected this about myself but... recently it's become pretty evident that I have no clue what love looks like, feels like. If I had maybe Ward wouldn't have... but that's not the issue. Taking my absolute ignorance into account I've the decided that the only way is to start with one thing I know, without a shadow of a doubt, to be true: I want to be with you." She pauses, lets the words hit him at the right angle. "In whatever capacity you let me. It doesn't even have to be... I just want to be with you."

Coulson looks down at his hands, the files on his desk.

"Can I have some time to think about it?"

"Yes, yes, of course," she replies, looking embarrassed that he might think she wouldn't, give him time. "Take as much as you need."

 

&

"Ward has asked to speak with us," May tells her. "Said he wanted to explain."

"With us?"

"With you, and Coulson. And..."

Skye finishes for her: "And _you_."

May nods.

"Well, good luck to him," she says, fully knowing that at some point, eventually, they'll go see him. Not just yet.

May smiles at her: "That's what I said."

 

&

He lets a day pass, two.

He doesn't know why. He took the decision the moment she told him.

 

&

A day passes, two. Which, Skye guesses, is as much of an answer as she needs from Coulson. It surprises her how calm she is about the whole thing. She's disappointed, of course, but she doesn't regret for a moment having told him how she felt.

Now she's in the lab, happily listening to Fitz rant on about the atrocities HYDRA has committed with his blueprints, his ideas for new and shiny gadgets.

"I mean, I know it's HYDRA," he says, "and they are basically, yes, _nazis_ , I realize, but you would think they'd have a little more respect for the concept of intellectual property."

"You would think so, uh?" she teases him. Fitz takes a moment to look at her, really look at her. "What?"

"Well, look who seems in a much better mood," he says.

"I do? Mmm. I guess I am."

She realizes it's true.

Fitz grins at her.

"And," he adds, "since I have you in a good mood and since I've clearly my hands full... would you do me the favour of getting two or three small couplings from upstairs. First closet, a drawer marked APZ3."

"Hey, I'm not useless, I know where the couplings are"

"Do you?"

"No," she laughs.

She goes upstairs, that laughter still in her stride as she climbs the stairs.

She accidentally bumps into Coulson on the second floor, because, of course she does.

"Oh, hi," she says to his usual stoic face. "I'm getting some couplings for Fitz. I _totally_ know where the coupling are. Also, _what are_ couplings again?"

That would normally get her a smile from Coulson, even in his stoic-est moments. She wonders what's wrong. She wonders if it's because of the awkward position she's put him in.Then she stops wondering because Coulson slips his arm around her waist and puts his mouth to hers like it's the most natural thing to do, but also like it's the most extraordinary thing to do. He has them pressed against each other tightly, his palm held to the small of her back. This kiss is – unlike the others. Unlike when he let himself be kissed in his office. Unlike when he returned hers without thinking. Unlike when he kissed her, full of worry for her, after they had sex. This has nothing to do with all that.

When he lets her go Skye admits she needs a moment to recover.

"Is this your answer to my offer?" she asks.

Coulson looks... she doesn't know, flustered, maybe, agitated.

"I don't know why I didn't say _yes_ immediately," he tells her, sounding almost apologetic. "As you were saying it I knew I couldn't refuse."

"Are you sure? I don't want you to just give in because–"

"You told me you thought I deserved to have everything I wanted. You still believe that?"

"Of course."

"I have no damn clue, either, Skye, of what I'm doing or what _this_ is supposed to be. So I took your advice and I focused on one thing, just one, that I knew to be irrefutably true."

He takes her face in his hands. He doesn't have to say it, she knows: he wants this. He wants her.

He backs up his words (and the words he hasn't said yet) with another kiss, more assured this time, and less frantic, his tongue hot and expert in her mouth. He kisses her like they didn't start this from an essentially fucked-up place. He kisses her like it doesn't really matter where they started from, as long as they started.

Okay, Skye thinks, curiously able to finally _breathe_ only when she has her mouth pressed to his, maybe she's glad she survived the day of the assault after all.


End file.
